Who Owns Your Dot Files

The recommended way to install or update rust is with rustup. And by default, rustup modifies your shell startup files to put itself on PATH. And rustup is by no means the only example, it’s just the one I encountered most recently.

This is extremely bad default behavior. My plea to you, maintainers of such tools: Don’t do that! Give me the option, or print out instructions, but do not assume that you have any legitimate control of my dot files!

Sadly, most programmers prefer this type of convenience to knowing their system configuration. Convenience seems always to win out in these contests over security, stability, and control. How many make their dot files read only? If you don’t, who owns your dot files?